Arthur Laurents Quotes

If you want to support a writer, produce the first five plays he writes.

I'm not responsible for the commercialization. The people who produce the plays are responsible for it.

What Lou Tyrrell creates when he has a theater is a birthing center for new plays.

Is the American theatre allowing itself to become irrelevant? The problem isn't that playwrights aren't being paid enough. It's that theatres all over America are looking towards New York to tell them what new plays to do.

That is a gift to have four weeks to rehearse something. But remember, when you're doing a play half of that time you're getting to know the play and the other actors and then finally in the third week you have it pretty much on its feet. So it's all relative in different ways.

I have worked with Tarell Alvin McCraney, who is the play Moonlight is based on. He's a company member at Steppenwolf. I have done a could of his plays here.

Musical numbers should carry the action of the play and should be representative of the personalities of the characters who sing them.

When the play is still evolving I try to be at rehearsal as often as possible, and part of that casting process. You find new things when the language is living in different people's mouths.

This is the free enterprise system. The only place in the world that I can recall where companies never failed was the old Soviet Union. This is what investors do in free enterprise and capitalism system. [...[ And, yes, free enterprise system can be cruel. But the problem with this administration is that small businesses are the one who had suffered the most, the kind that need investors, the kinds that don't need the hundreds of pages, thousands of pages of regulations that continue to plague them and have them hold back on the hiring investment.

I discover that I am thinking about a play, which is the first awareness I have that a new play is forming. When I'm aware of the play forming in my head, it's already at a certain degree in development.

A play for me never really takes on an aspect of reality until it has left the dryair of the study and begins to sniff the musty breezes of a bare stage.

When people see success, particularly investors, they are much more willing to invest in artistic projects.

Take some wood and canvas and nails and things. Build yourself a theater, a stage, light it, learn about it. When you've done that you will probably know how to write a play.

The commercial theatre may still be considered one of New York's primary tourist attractions, but . . . there is no longer an audience for serious Broadway plays. . . . Perhaps we should acknowledge that, having lost its traditional audience, Broadway can never again be a home for new plays.

Being a producer and a star of the play was a lot more challenging and difficult than I ever anticipated, but so rewarding. I got to be involved with the writing, the casting.

Some directors are very free and some directors are very specific. It seemed like doing a play.

There's always the danger that there are so damn many things that a playwright can examine in this society of ours - things that have less to do with his artistic work than have to do with the critical and aesthetic environment - that perhaps he does have to worry about whether or not he is writing too fast. But then also, perhaps he should worry about getting as many plays on as possible before the inevitable ax falls.

I certainly did plays in high school and community theater, and I want to get back on the stage.

For a creative person there's just as much pleasure in writing an eight-line poem as there is in writing a blockbuster play ... of the old '50s type.

I've always had great satisfaction out of writing the plays. I've not always had great satisfaction out of seeing them produced-although often I've had satisfaction there. When things go well in production, on opening there's no nicer feeling in the world-what could be nicer than watching an audience respond? You can't that from a book. It's a fine feeling to walk into the theater and see living people respond to something you've done.

I did a run of a play over the summer in a really tiny theater in New York and that was rejuvenating for me. I directed a short series for Hulu called Paloma and being in an editing room, I learned a lot about acting.

It's the function of a playwright to write. Some playwrights write a large number of plays, some write a small number.

Most of the time when you do a job, a play or a film, you're wondering, "Will there be an audience?"

Like all school students, I think I did a play in my school. The common things, I would say. Nothing really exceptional.

Science is the exploration of the experience of nature without psychedelics. And I propose, therefore, to expand that enterprise and say that we need a science beyond science. We need a science which plays with a full deck.